Bring Back the Light
by EvoKov
Summary: The Darkness and the Demon Lord took everything from me when I was but a child. I will do anything to vanquish them both and return light and hope to this land - even if I must become a devil like the one I seek to slay. \One Way Heroics/ Posted here since no category yet. HeroXFrieda


**Prologue**

I was six years old when the darkness first arrived to engulf the land. No one knew where it came from or how, but the prevailing opinion held by both laymen and scholars alike was that it was a corruption from another dimension that had escaped to pervert our own. To be honest, at first it was more of a curiosity rather than a threat. Many people were initially afraid, as people tend to be when something strange and unknown enters their lives, but after its initial appearance the seemingly harmless if sinister nature of the Darkness made it easy to ignore, if not forget.

Naturally, some made efforts to explore the Darkness, to see what had become of the lands and people swallowed up by it. Those efforts all proved to be in vain: dozens entered the impenetrable black fog and none ever returned.

My own parents were among the foolish who tried.

Not long after the first souls entered its depths, the Darkness began to expand. Its pace was slow, but inexorable: great scholars and magicians from across the land attempted everything that was within their power to halt the advance of the Darkness to no avail, and slowly but surely entire nations were swallowed up. And then, just when the people of the world feared that the worst had befallen them, the Demon Lord appeared in a storm of fire and fury.

His power was immense, his rage unstoppable. Aortala, the greatest city on the southern continent and my home town, was annihilated in an afternoon by the Demon Lord. Hundreds were slaughtered without mercy by the devil himself, while nearly a thousand more were forced to flee from the army of monsters that had spawned forth from the Darkness to lay waste to all in their path. On that terrible day the Darkness surged forward more than it ever had before until the ruins of Aortala were nothing but a memory in the minds of the few who'd escaped.

Panic was widespread after that. Social order began to break down as people began to despair at the true end of the world, and sin and violence quickly became common practice as human decency was rapidly forgotten. For a time it seemed as though the Darkness and the Demon Lord would not longer be needed to destroy the world. Humans would take care of that on their own.

Then...something incredible happened. A hero wielding a golden, holy axe appeared at the same time as the Demon Lord in the city of Damara, on the edge of the darkness. Most had already fled the city but the few who had not yet made it out described an incredible battle between this mysterious hero and the devil. For the first time ever the Demon Lord was halted in his destruction as the hero fell upon him with their mighty axe. The ground shook as the two powers clashed and an explosion of light and sound levelled much of the city that was still standing. When the dust settled however, the Demon Lord had fled and the hero stood in its place with grievous wounds. Before any could intervene, it was said that the hero took off for the encroaching Darkness whereupon they threw the holy axe with all their might into its depths, which had the impossible effect of dispersing the Darkness and driving it back more than a thousand kilometres, revealing lands that had once been consumed.

Although it was a great victory, the hero's accomplishment rang hollow. The lands that had been liberated were scorched and blackened, lifeless in every way. The Demon Lord, whom all had hoped had been vanquished, suffered only a temporary defeat and returned again just months later albeit with reduced power, but twice the cruelty and malice. And the Darkness, which had been driven back and slowed in its advance, slowly but surely began to creep back across the land as a black wall of despair for all who still lived.


End file.
